Iranian-American musician, Aida Shahghasemi's cover of "Bahar."
Vocals, Guitar, new arrangement: Aida Shangasemi
Piano: Nima Hafezieh

Artist Statement: Spring has always meant initiation: the beginning. Spring comes and the world becomes anew. Our socio-political history has also been filled with numerous springs representing the waves of change brought to fruition through revolutionaries. This song originally sang by Haydeh, and created by Mohammad Heidari and Manouchehr Cheshmazar, is for me a perfect retelling of how the season of spring feels to me as anIranian living in diaspora. Spring is never the same far away from where I consider home. Just like the song, spring is happy, beautiful, and uplifting, yet the words tell the tale of a heart aching for home. As the seasons repeat themselves, so does history. We eb and flow within the hands of those who hold power and make decisions that drastically change our lives. Sanctions, presented as diplomatic methods of applying pressure onto a government with the goal of making it bend to others’ will is nothing short of a bomb-less war. It promises a spring while in reality bring a desolate winter to the everyday humans attempting to survive. Between the binds of an unforgiving global pandemic and ever-tightening sanctions, I have had numerous family members, including children, ending up in hospitals in Iran that are currently re-using resources because sanctions limit imports of medical necessities. Sanctions are shiny gift-wrapping paper and ribbons for a vile of poison that slowly kills. I would like to hope for a spring that is indeed real, inside and out, and smells like jasmines and violets and reminds me of grandmother’s mirror on the mantle. One day, maybe, it shall come.

Katayoun Amjadi, In the Time of Roses, 2021

O Hāfez, what can be said, that we are nightingales, silent in the season of roses?

Are we disheartened?

O Hāfez, how can we be silent in the time of roses?

Sing nightingale.

Sing my little heart.

Katayoun Amjadi, Letter to Baba, 2020

Letter to Baba is a video work seen as both documentary and diary, at once profoundly personal, yet speaking to universal truth and fear.

In the beginning was a word, daughter to father. “Baba?” 

It is a simple inquiry, a request for presence and assurance in troubled times. Nothing is written. There is no paper, no pen, nor gun nor sword, just a word, spoken plainly, if not plaintively, of one seeking wisdom and insight from the past in order to illuminate what is now, in full measure, the nearness to war.

The tender voice tinged with curiosity, fear and resignation, probes histories, close at hand and universal, for shards of truth in a world fractured and tilted badly off axis.